STACK #207 Jan 2022

CINEMA FEATURE

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going to be a lot of physical stuff,’ and I was like ‘Yeah, no problem, I can do that man, no worries’. And then like fast forward six months down the line and I am dragging myself through the sh–t. But it was good,” he laughs. Describing his character, he says, “Conrad is a 17-year-old, he’s the Marquis of Woodstock, he’s young, brave and aristocratic. His father is the Duke of Oxford, so he’s been living with him in this very grandiose, strict, upper-class lifestyle. He’s naive to the real world when we first meet him.” While Kingsman: The Secret Service and its sequel, Kingsman: The Golden Circle (2017), were both big box office hits, Vaughn wasn’t ready for a third film, instead looking to do something different with this new iteration, kicking off The King’s Man story more than a century earlier, playing out in the shadow of WWI. “I wanted to do a huge, epic adventure. When I was a kid, films like Lawrence of Arabia filled the screen and were epic but never boring, so I was thinking, ‘I want to bring back that genre.’ It was an itch I wanted to scratch. “Balance is the key to everything and this is a different film. It’s the origin story, and the destination can’t be the same place as where you embark from. You have got to have a journey, so this embarks from a very different place to the other Kingsman movies. “And the journey starts with elements of what we know some of the Kingsman for, but this is a companion piece and a different film. It’s connected through the tailor shop and through the history and values, but it’s different, otherwise there’s no point. I didn’t just want to do just another Kingsman movie and put them in period suits and go ‘Hey, now let’s go have a fight in a church.’” Having enjoyed his action-adventure trip into the past, don’t imagine that Vaughn has given up on the original Kingsman franchise – a third film of the original franchise is already in the works. “We were meant to be prepping in November [2020] for Kingsman 3 ,” he reveals. “But Covid decided to f–k that up for everyone, so we are waiting to see what happens. I am hoping that people like this version because I would love to go through the decades, because Kingsman is about history, espionage and fashion. It’s fun to explore. “So, touch wood, people go watch it and like it and yeah, there will be more. The audience is the boss, not me.” MOREKINGSMAN?

MatthewVaughn’s 2014 spy action-comedy Kingsman: The Secret Service introduced the world to a young Taron Egerton. Now the writer-director hopes to recreate magic with its prequel, The King’s Man , starring British actor Harris Dickinson. Words Gill Pringle

“T he way I cast is purely about what I see, and Harris blew me away within ten minutes,” Vaughn tells STACK when we chat over Zoom. Not that Dickinson, 24, is entirely a newbie, having already made quite an impression in Maleficent: Mistress of Evil and dystopian teen drama The Darkest Minds . “The way I cast, I am very instinctive, and when an actor walks through the door, it’s the same experience an audience has watching the screen with somebody entering a scene. And then they open their mouth and you either

think, ‘f–ing hell, they are good or they are terrible,’” says Vaughn. “And it was the same with Taron. I’d virtually given up on finding anyone in both those scenarios. And weirdly, Harris was the second person I saw for the role. But then he got it and that was it. If they are right, they are right, and unless I am 100 per cent sure they are right for the role, I don’t give it to them. You either believe it or you don’t, and I believed in Harris immediately.” Chatting with Dickinson about his initial audition, he says, “I think Matthew had watched some of my work and we met and

he told me a little bit about the film because I hadn’t been sent anything. It was kind of unorthodox; Matthew is very laid back and doesn’t pretend to be anything he is not, he just says it like it is, which is what I love about him.” Prior to his audition, Dickinson didn’t necessarily have any fight skills, and was worried he might not be up to the job. “Matthew gave me a challenge and was like, ‘Oh you know there’s

The King’s Man is in cinemas on Jan 6

JANUARY 2022

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